Donating a game losing enchantment to an opponent has been one of Magic’s favorite niche deck building combos since Illusions of Grandeur, and the trick almost always fails in competitive Standard for the exact same reason: drawing four copies of a card like Harmless Offering isn’t nearly consistent enough when your own enchantments are actively trying to kill you.
Within the first 24 hours of Magic: The Gathering Star Trek hitting MTG Arena ahead of this Friday’s tabletop release, Standard players have already solved that math problem, while Hall of Famer Shahar Shenhar is busy attacking the Best-of-Three ladder from the opposite direction with a graveyard-filling engine built around the new rare enchantment Hit It!.
Rather than relying on fragile five card loops, both decks use cheap Star Trek enchantments and sorceries to turn clunky setup pieces into redundant, on curve Standard threats.
How Rules of Acquisition Completes the Kobayashi Maru Donate Lock
When Kobayashi Maru Scenario was previewed in October, players immediately noticed its obvious synergy with Foundations reprint Harmless Offering. The problem was redundancy: running eight ”lose the game” enchantments alongside only four donate effects meant half your games ended with your own cards rotting in your hand.
In a recent gameplay breakdown, MTG creator SlothMtg showcased a Grixis/Dimir-base Standard list that fixes the bottleneck by pairing four copies of Kobayashi Maru Scenario and Demonic Pact with four copies of Star Trek’s Rules of Acquisition alongside Harmless Offering.
Here is how the eight-donate shell closes out a game:
- Deploy the ticking clock: Cast Kobayashi Maru Scenario or Demonic Pact on curve, extracting immediate card advantage, life drain, or discard value during your early turns before the final ”you lose the game” mode or trigger becomes mandatory.
- Initiate the handoff: Before the lethal trigger goes on the stack, cast either Harmless Offering or Rules of Acquisition, selecting the ”98th Rule of Acquisition” mode.
- Resolve the exchange: Target your opponent and the primed Kobayashi Maru Scenario or Demonic Pact. With Rules of Acquisition, target opponent gains control of target nonland permanent you control, and you draw three cards.
- Close the game: Because your opponent now controls the enchantment as its final condition triggers, the ”you lose the game” effect resolves under their control, ending the match on the spot.
What elevates Rules of Acquisition over previous redundancy pieces like Coveted Falcon is that it never forces you to leave a creature vulnerable to removal, and drawing three cards on resolution dig straight into counter magic or interaction to protect the lock.
Shahar Shenhar’s ”Hit It!” Standard Engine
While the Kobayashi Maru shell plays like a classic prison combo control deck, two-time World Champion Shahar Shenhar took a far more explosive approach to the Arena ladder in a Best-of-Three Standard showcase centered on Hit It!.
While blue decks are trying to give away their enchantments, Gruul players have a much more straightforward option.
Hit It! costs three mana and grants every creature you control haste. When it enters, you reveal the top five cards of your library, put a land from among them onto the battlefield tapped if possible, and send the remaining cards to your graveyard.
That combination is particularly attractive alongside Mightform Harmonizer and Mossborn Hydra.
Mossborn Hydra doubles its +1/+1 counters whenever a land enters under your control. Mightform Harmonizer provides an additional Landfall trigger that doubles a creature’s power for the turn.
With those creatures already on the battlefield, resolving Hit It! can immediately trigger both abilities. The Hydra grows, the Harmonizer can double its power, and Hit It! ensures freshly deployed creatures can attack without waiting a turn.
Additional land drops make the damage scale rapidly. With multiple Landfall triggers and an established board, even a modest Hydra can become a lethal trampling threat.
This isn’t an infinite combo. Each land entering provides a finite number of triggers, and the deck still needs creatures capable of dealing combat damage.
The appeal is how many jobs Hit It! performs at once. It helps accelerate into expensive threats, fills the graveyard for cards that benefit from it, and makes new creatures immediate attackers.
One small rules detail is worth remembering: the cards placed into your graveyard by Hit It! aren’t technically milled. Abilities requiring cards to be milled won’t trigger from that effect.
View Shahar Shenhar’s Hit It! Decklist Here
Can Either Combo Survive Standard Sideboards?
Both decks benefit enormously from the week one Arena ladder effect, where opponents are still tuning maindecks for creature midrange and haven’t adjusted their sideboards for enchantment-based combo kills. Once the metagame adapts, however, each strategy faces a very clear choke point.
For the Kobayashi Maru and Rules of Acquisition deck, the biggest vulnerability isn’t enchantment removal, it’s instant speed enchantment sacrifice or bounce in response to the donate spell. If an opponent destroys your Kobayashi Maru Scenario with Get Lost or bounces it with Into the Flood Maw while Rules of Acquisition is on the stack, the target becomes illegal, or worse, you’re left holding a reset enchantment after burning your turn four play. Even more dangerous is an opponent holding up Three Steps Ahead or Negate on the exact turn your Demonic Pact runs out of harmless modes, turning your own win condition into an immediate self inflicted loss.
Shenhar’s Hit It! engine avoids the ”lose to your own card” risk, making it the stronger bet for Best-of-Three play, though it remains exposed to Standard’s deep pool of instant speed graveyard hate like Ghost Vacuum and Rest in Peace. If you want to punish unprepared midrange piles on Arena this week, Rules of Acquisition finally makes donating Kobayashi Maru Scenario mathematically consistent, just make sure you count your opponent’s untapped blue mana before reading them the 98th Rule.
